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RAIN-STOPPING BRAHMANS
I shall be highly obliged if you kindly allow me to relate through the columns of your celebrated Journal, an event, whose seemingly recondite character may excite the curiosity and deserve the attention of a large majority of readers. There lived in the interior of the district of Hugli, a person named Ram Kany Ghosh, by religion a Vaishnava, who was known to have attained a certain development of the higher faculties by a regular and constant practice of concentration in an enclosed room three hours a day. On a certain occasion he invited a number of Brahmins, who were seated to dine on the open yard of his homely village mansion. The day was cloudy and it began to rain. The man alarmed at the sight of Brahmins rising from their unfinished meal, hastened to the place, gazed on the sky, 43and loudly exclaimed, “Sir! stop a little.” To the astonishment of the beholders the threatening sky maintained a sudden and sullen silence till the feast was completed.
A similar event occurred, a few years ago, at Satpukur, where during a long and severe drought, a sannyasi pronounced a successful prediction of a shower at two o’clock the next day,
Now, is it possible to determine, whether the events should be attributed to the gift of miracles or to the knowledge of futurity of the advanced students of Occult Philosophy? A solution of this difficulty would probably be deemed as a valuable contribution to the knowledge of uninitiated students.
I remain, Madam,
Yours most obediently,
H. MUKHOPADYAYA.
BHOWANIPORE,
November, 83.
EDITOR’S NOTE.—We have much heard of, but little believed in, “gifts of miracles.” We may go further and say at once that we deny most emphatically the possibility of producing “miracles,” yet we believe as firmly in the possession by great Sadhus and Initiates of the power of stopping or rather of delaying and magnetically paralyzing the rain cloud. We say that the facts of the story given are possible, though by no means probable. Sadhus who possess such powers are not usually grihasthas, passing their lives in small villages; and certainly it requires more than three hours a day of “constant concentration” to produce such a phenomenon, however much it may be based on the knowledge of natural laws.